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1 Preface This Thesis Explores the Ways in Which Anaïs Nin Preface This thesis explores the ways in which Anaïs Nin demonstrates the creation of individual gender identity in her Erotica series, Delta of Venus, and Little Birds. In it, I use Judith Butler’s queer theory to deconstruct the self-gendering messages which Nin includes in her writing. Before I do that, however, I need to address a few issues. The first is the issue of originality. Nin is not the first female author to explore the creation of self in writing, nor is she necessarily the first female author to explore alternate genderings through fiction. France has a long literary tradition of self-construction in erotic literature. While Nin was writing the Diary and her erotic short stories, her French contemporaries Marguerite Duras and Sydonie-Gabrielle Collette were addressing similar issues in their work. Nin was aware of these authors and admired them greatly, as repeated entries in her diaries attest. Moreover, many of the same themes that intrigue students of Nin are also studied by students of Colette and Duras. Despite its similarities to French female-authored erotica, Nin’s Erotica is unique and deserves study for a variety of reasons. The first reason that Nin’s Erotica merits individual study is based in the circumstances under which she wrote it. In the 1940’s, while living in New York, Nin supported herself by writing erotic short stories for an unknown collector. She took over this job from Henry Miller, who found writing pornography exhausting and wanted to spend more time on his own writing. Although the collector was initially resistant to Nin’s replacing Miller, he grew to enjoy her work after she submitted a few stories. His only real problem lay with her style. In her diary, Nin had created a lyrical, almost poetic writing style. The collector, on the other hand, wanted Nin to write in a more realistic and sexually explicit style. Nin found it difficult to adjust her writing to suit her patron. As she recounts in the introduction to Delta of Venus, whenever she sought to inject emotion, feeling, and lyricism into her writing, she was reminded to “Concentrate on sex. Leave out the poetry” (xii). Nin felt that the collector’s preoccupation with the sensations of the body and his exclusion of emotion effectively destroyed any eroticism. As she wrote to her patron, You do not know what you are missing by your microscopic examinations of sexual activity to the exclusion of aspects which are the fuel that ignites it. Intellectual, imaginative, romantic, emotional. This is what gives sex its surprising textures, its subtle transformations, its aphrodisiac elements. You are shrinking your world of sensations. You are withering it, starving it, draining its blood. .Only the united beat of sex and heart can create ecstasy (xv-xvi). 1 Upset with the way she was coerced to change her style, Nin refused to publish the Erotica for decades. Upon rereading it in the 1970’s, however, she discovered that, her capitulation to the collector notwithstanding, she had effectively created something unique: I believed that my style [in the erotica] was derived from a reading of men’s works. For this reason, I long felt that I had compromised my feminine self. .Rereading it these many years later, I see that my own voice was not completely suppressed. In numerous passages I was intuitively using a woman’s language, seeing sexual experience from a woman’s point of view. I finally decided to release the erotica for publication because it shows the beginning efforts of a woman in a world that had been the domain of men (xvi-xvii). Thus, Nin felt that she had offered a feminine sexual voice, something that had been lacking in the erotic genre in America. This brings us to the second major issue, a consideration of Nin’s relationship to French erotica. In some ways, Nin translated the French art of erotica writing into English, and repackaged it for an American audience. As she states: France has had a tradition of literary erotic writing, in fine, elegant style. When I first began to write for the collector I thought there was a similar tradition here, but found none at all. All I had seen was shoddy, written by second rate writers. No fine writer seemed ever to have tried his hand at erotica (xiii). So Nin set out to write “fine, elegant” erotica in English. She surrounded herself with a coterie of writers, and they all wrote for the collector: I gathered poets around me and we all wrote beautiful erotica. As we were condemned to focus only on sensuality, we had violent explosions of poetry. Writing erotica became a road to sainthood rather than to debauchery (xiv). Essentially Nin, who was widely read in French literature but wrote in English, attempted to reproduce the customs and methods of a French literary style in America. In this, she was somewhat successful. When Nin’s Erotica collections were published in the mid- 1970’s, they became her only bestsellers, and among the first female-authored erotic collections to be written in English. They were widely read, and lauded for their uniquely feminine approach to sexuality. The time has come to laud Nin’s Erotica for more than the fact that it was written by a woman. As American society begins to explore the idea of gender identity construction in 2 literature and film, it should consider one of the first English-language writers to explore this topic in fiction. Nin’s time has arrived. Bruce W. Watson Jr. Blacksburg, Virginia 3 Chapter One Claiming Ownership: Issues in Nin Criticism Throughout her life, Anaïs Nin was never at a loss for critics, literary and otherwise. Shortly after her father deserted her, Nin’s mother, Rosa, bought her a notebook in the hopes that it would distract her from her feelings of abandonment and provide an outlet for her creative energies. While she originally intended to use the notebook as a sketch-pad for the drawings she hoped would be her vocation, Nin soon began using it to write stories about her life. She initially conceived her diary as a letter to her father, but it quickly became the lens through which she viewed and re-viewed the world. The diary soon progressed beyond the distraction Rosa had hoped it would be and became an obsession for Nin. Her relatives became worried at her constant jotting and her mother eventually had to nag Nin to stop writing and concentrate on the “real” world. For Nin, the diary became her “real” world. Over the next sixty years, Nin would continue to write in it, filling thousands of pages in over a hundred volumes. It would become her other identity, her confidant, her constant companion, the repository of all her experience, and the foundation of her literary reputation. Nin would re-write her life in the diary, and then re-write the diary as stories. In the diary, Nin created herself; out of the diary, she created fiction. Given the impact of the diary on her life, it is no surprise that it has become the basis of much of the literary criticism which has been applied to Nin. The primary dividing line in Nin criticism has traditionally been disagreement over the relative merits of her diary versus her fiction. This question has led to the evolution of two rather amorphous camps: those who feel her fiction was a purer distillation of her diary, and those who feel Nin’s diary is her greatest achievement, compared to which her fiction is a pale copy. It is difficult, however, to accurately portray these two camps as equals. The majority of Nin criticism has been based on the Diary, mainly because it is the largest and most deeply personal portion of her oeuvre. By comparison, Nin criticism has generally given her 4 fiction short shrift, and has almost completely avoided mention of her Erotica series. Consequently, the Nin criticism represented below is drastically skewed in favor of her Diary. Ultimately, however, this division seems unrealistic. Combatants on both sides agree that Nin’s fiction was the product of her diary. Furthermore, even the supporters of her diary are largely willing to admit that her constant rewriting of it, and the considerable editing that went into its publication, make the diary a spurious historical source at best, and a fictionalized narrative at worst. Moreover, just as Nin’s diary and fiction bled into each other, so the two lines of criticism have, to a great extent, combined. Because of the degree to which they influenced each other, and the critical perspectives they give on each other, it is difficult to discuss Nin’s fiction without discussing her diary, and vice-versa. Discussing Nin’s fiction without considering her diary is comparable to ignoring almost her entire source material. Conversely, discussing Nin’s diary without considering her fiction is tantamount to ignoring a primary example of her creative process while trying to unravel what is essentially a work of self-creation. Recognizing that traditional dividing lines in Nin scholarship are flawed, it is perhaps better to consider her critics thematically, rather than through the cracked lens of a theoretical division that seems increasingly irrelevant. With this in mind, I have chosen to review those aspects of Nin criticism that are relevant to a consideration of her Erotica from a queer theory perspective. First among these is Nin’s act of self-creation. “Self-creation” may seem an odd term to apply to someone who relentlessly recorded her every thought, her every deed, and every significant event in her life.
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